as from the corpse, no door

BY DIANA KHOI NGUYEN

Pale girl, fat carcass; boy uncut, unhooved.The combination of girl and boyin flowering desert. Girl and boy in flood,brackish water. For the sake of children. Her brainlike cauliflower, cheesecake in dark rooms;girl and boy: conscience between two mothers.The upper half of body, the lower depth of honey,rough beast, dark brass—burnt tokens from home,remnants, chrysanthemums in a gale. Their olio of limbs.Here then, new habitat: his foreheadin early sunlight where cold scarletand opaline mind, her cilia her sinew, mole underfoot.Here then, her false-thorned earrings and sycamore skins,wind white with petals wild from a week alone.Alone, undone—like a father and a feather whose forecast:breath, oil, fossil. Pharmakon: a cure as well as a poison.In open grave, her hands deep in the pockets of.The voice of a crane.

A native of California, Diana Khoi Nguyen has poems appearing or forthcoming in Poetry, Denver Quarterly, Gulf Coast, Kenyon Review Online, and West Branch, among others. She has also received awards from the Academy of American Poets and the Key West Literary Seminars, as well as scholarships from the Bread Loaf Writers Conference, Provincetown Fine Arts Work Center, and Community of Writers at Squaw Valley. A Bread Loaf Bakeless Camargo Residency Fellow, she earned her MFA from Columbia University and was recently a Roth Resident at Bucknell. She is pursuing a PhD at the University of Denver. For more: www.dianakhoinguyen.com.